Katrina still wreaking havoc.

New Orleans fell deeper into chaos on Friday with gangs roaming the streets and corpses rotting in the sun a full four days after Hurricane Katrina lashed the city and exposed federal aid efforts as a failure.

As the mayor of New Orleans expresses what can only be described as exasperated outrage

"I need reinforcements. I need troops, man. I need 500 buses, man," he said in a radio interview. "Now get off your asses and fix this. Let's do something and let's fix the biggest goddamn crisis in the history of this country."

Folks: Katrina hit New Orleans Monday morning. That was the 29th. On the 24th, I blogged the following about "Tropical Depression 12": "It has the Gulf Coast in its sights, and a potential trajectory that could take it right over Lake Pontchartrain (potentially driving a storm surge right into New Orleans)...." I didn't even know the storm was named Katrina when I wrote that, but I knew that New Orleans was a potential target.

If I could know that, it is simply beyond belief that federal emergency planners and relief agencies could not know it. The fact that the relief effort thus far has been so tragically pitiful, when the knowledge was available many days before the storm of its possible trajectory, is absolutely inexcusable. All of this was foreseeable. Relief workers should have been in place, on the ground, ready to move. That they were not suggests utter, inexcusable incompetence.